It’s a good thing that I have absolutely no interest in any of the games coming out between now and November, because the end of June was a little expensive. I had pre-ordered both Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE and Star Ocean without realizing that they (a) released in the same week and (b) it was the same week as Project Diva: Future Tone. Fortunately I had some extra income last month to offset this, but I will be honest in admitting that I didn’t know about the extra cash at the point where I made the unwise purchasing decisions.

I suppose I should be thankful for how generous Amazon is with pre-order discounts for Prime customers, though being enthralled by their aggressive discounting is precisely how I wound up in this mess in the first place.

So it goes.

Anyway, Project Diva: Future Tone is pretty much Sega’s ultimate love letter to Miku fans, collecting all of their songs from the PSP and Vita games and presenting them with HD visuals and some updated mechanics.

Seriously, it has 220+ songs and was a little over 60 bucks after the currency conversion; previous games have cost nearly that and only come with 40 tracks. If you like Vocaloid music at all, it’s a crazy deal.

But, as I found out, it’s both naturally harder – which is fine! – and can also be made quite difficult for yourself without really meaning to.

For example: I often make use of the headphone jack on the PS4 controller so I can hear game audio without disturbing my wife. It turns out that using a wireless controller, and then using the controller’s audio out, and furthermore playing on an LCD screen without, you know, using the game’s built-in timing calibration feature… Well, it’s not exactly a recipe for precision timing.

I did very, very poorly even on “Normal” difficulty, and that’s with playing songs that I have heard, on a lowball estimate, twenty or more times.

On the other hand, after pulling a Hori Fighting Commander wired pad out of a drawer, and plugging in a cheap USB DAC so I wasn’t using Bluetooth audio, and actually calibrating the game to the screen… I STILL did worse than I would like but much better than before. I can now blame mistakes on my OWN derpiness rather than wondering if I’m being undone by wireless latency.

Mind you, the front of my PS4 looks like it’s buried in black spaghetti, what with the cable for the DAC and the way overlong cable for the wired pad and the necessary USB hub and so on. But it works!

One final note: Future Tone gives me a new nemesis to replace the godawful scratch sections in Diva F2. Now, it has single notes that need to be played by hitting four buttons at one. I’ll get the hang of them in time, I’m sure, but for now I curse them and whoever thought they were a good idea.